When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot - 1

By Robert Levin

Blanche Dubois always depended on the kindness of strangers. Me, I've always depended on strangers thinking I'm someone else.

I'm referring, in my case anyway, to getting sex.

I know it's weird, but the assumption some women make that I'm one or another of a certain group of actors and musicians has been, from my early adulthood to what's now my middle age, how I get my pipes cleaned more or less regularly and for free.

It's also made it possible for me to have (however briefly and if you're willing to stretch the definition) an actual relationship.

I should make it clear right away that on my own terms I'm not someone you'd describe as spilling over with attractive qualities. For one thing, a future with the second towel man in a car wash certainly isn't something a lot of women lie awake at night fantasizing about. No, it's not that I'm dumb; it's a problem that I have with applying and executing. I'm not good at those things. In fact, I'm terrible at them. I think this is because I've never been comfortable with the whole business of living. There's something unnatural about it that I find unsettling and I tend to lose my concentration in the least challenging of situations. You might want to indulge a generous impulse and remind me that anyone, on a given day, can screw up the Post Office test. But when I tell you that I also failed the New York City Transit Authority's dispatcher quiz, you'll have to agree that the condition of ineptitude here does for sure have a stunning dimension.

And if my level of achievement and corresponding financial circumstances aren't enough to give a lady pause, there's my appearance. Although I'm of Greek ancestry, the figure that I cut is something less than Greek. Just under average height, more skinny than slim, and with long, usually unkempt hair hanging over my ears and forehead and down the scruff of my neck, I also have heavily lidded eyes, sunken cheeks and a pallor that's cadaverous. While we may not be talking Elephant Man, this still isn't a picture I'd want to keep in MY heart-shaped locket.

But here's the thing: When I look in the mirror I see (if a likeness is to be drawn at all) Ratso Rizzo or Sonny, the pathetic loser in "Scarecrow." But a number of women, when they look at me, see Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino. Or, for that matter, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, among others.

Typically, and on an average of once a month, I'll be in a bar, seated alone in a corner and nursing a beer when, just like that, a woman will be at my shoulder.

"I know this is rude," she will say, "but I couldn't help myself. I had to come over to tell you how mesmerizing you were in 'Godfather II'."

Or: "'Positively Fourth Street' - it changed my life."

I realized some years later that the "strange thing" (as I came to call it) surfaced for the first time when I was only twelve. A dozen or so teenage girls were exiting a theater that was playing "A Hard Day's Night." As I passed by on the other side of the street, one shouted something and then three or four of them broke from the others and began to run in my direction. I can recall my sensory equipment registering a small blip that this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But terrified by their shrieks and the predatory way they were licking their lips, my reaction was to flee.

Nine years would pass before anything remotely comparable happened again, but by then, though no less mystified by what was taking place, I was at least ready to respond more appropriately.

Two weeks after my twenty-first birthday (and just one week after my graduation from high school), I was working as a messenger and in a cab on a summer morning with a package to deliver. Heading across town we were paused at a light when an incredible creature materialized. Wire thin, without a curve or a bump in her entire torso, and all arms and legs (especially legs - in my memory, doubtless distorted by time, her skirt is hemmed at just under her chin), she had to have been seven feet tall, and I'm not even counting the fuck-me heels and tendril-like spikes of hair that, drooping just a bit at the ends and gently waving as she moved, erupted from the top of her head. Factoring in the enormous sunglasses she wore (sported?) on an oval face, she resembled nothing so much as a giant insect.

Coming alongside the cab, she did a broad double take, exclaimed, "Holy shit, I don't believe this," and yanked the door open. The light was still red when, tucking me back into my pants, she said, "Say 'hi' to Miss Baez for me, Bobby."

(I remember that my driver was holding both sides of his head with his hands and that his eyes were popping out like cartoon eyes on springs. When we arrived at my destination he not only refused to take any money, he actually gave ME a roll of quarters.)

I still had no reason to regard this incident as anything more than a bizarre and isolated case of mistaken identity, until I encountered, a couple of weeks later in a bar, another woman who was under the impression I was Bob Dylan - and then another who was thoroughly persuaded that I was Al Pacino. With these events I could hardly fail to recognize the pattern that was developing.

Of course it would be awhile before I got a handle on the amazing gift I'd been handed and was able to realize something like its full potential. But in much the same way that I finally achieved respectable levels of competency in toilet procedures and at masturbating by myself, determination, practice and a willingness to learn from my mistakes paid off and I became increasingly proficient at utilizing it.

In the first of the instances I've just noted, for example, my response to the woman who approached me was to thank her for the implicit compliment and then to correct her. But when I observed that being truthful didn't just dampen her interest in me but provoked a discernible hostility — when, that is, she put her cigarette out in my drink and called me an "asshole" — I understood that denying the identity a woman assigned me was not the way to go and that I'd do well in the future to stifle the reflex to be honest.

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When Pacino's Hot, I'm Hot - 1

By Robert Levin